Every Drummer’s Rescue Mission: Overcoming the Biggest Challenge of Playing Drums
- Posted on 11th June 2013
- in Drum Technique
- by Bill Gato
Foundational Principles of the Henry Adler – Buddy Rich Technique – Part 2
When you sign up for drum lessons, you’re also signing up for a rescue mission.
Your mission will not require parachuting over Arabian deserts, high-speed motorcycle chases or Navy SEAL training. Your mission requires patience. It is a life-long pursuit.
Your prize? All of those powerful qualities you associate with master drummers: Speed. Coordination. Musicality. Gracefulness. Ambidexterity.
As a preparation for your mission – which I will reveal momentarily — consider the last time you performed these simple activities:
- Threw a football.
- Brushed your teeth.
- Signed your name with a ballpoint pen.
- Spread peanut butter on a slice of bread.
- Combed your hair.
- Hammered a nail.
- Shook hands.
What do these have in common?
If you’re like 90 percent of men and 88 percent of women, you performed all of those activities with your right hand. And if you’re among the 10 percent that is left handed, you were just as effective performing them with your left hand. Either way, you performed these activities exclusively with one hand or the other. Scientists call this “handedness.”
Handedness theories and the “Vanishing Twin”
Scientists don’t yet know the reasons for handedness. Theories have abounded for years. The most recent one I heard was the “Vanishing Twin” theory: Lefties were twins who survived the early death of their siblings in the womb. During gestation each twin embraced the other with one hand and learned to grasp with their free hand.
Regardless of its causes or effects, handedness poses a unique challenge for anyone learning to play drums. Drumming requires the sophisticated and balanced use of both the left and the right hands. For most of your life, you have led with one hand or the other. This means that your opposite hand has never learned to throw footballs, brush your teeth or write with a pen.
That opposite hand has remained…underutilized. Dormant. Like the child at the schoolyard who never got to play.
And now that you need that “child” on your team to help you play drums, he or she is unprepared. If you were to attempt any of those seven activities with your weaker side, it would feel awkward. And if you were to play drum rudiments, your weaker hand will slow you down. Try it now and you shall see.
In a morbid sense, it’s as if we all had a Vanished Twin that has come back to haunt.
Are you ready to accept your mission? Here it is…
Click here for the continuation of Every Drummer’s Rescue Mission.
Bill Gato is the Founder of Drum Lessons Miami, a South Florida blog and private instruction school that teaches the Buddy Rich-Henry Adler drumming technique. For more information, visit www.drumlessonsmiami.com or send an e-mail to [email protected].
Tags: Bill Gato, Buddy Rich, drum lessons, drumming, drums, Henry Adler, miami